It's been widely reported and that makes it fact-esque. - Stephen Colbert

It's an interesting day for the New York Times Editorial Board. While it has been stumbling around the last couple of years trying to find its feet as conservatism collapsed and it was faced with a Democratic president aping Republican policies they'd been volubly against for years, it found itself sinking into a mire of irrelevance and confusion, becoming more often a local scold than the national conscience it was during Bush's first term and half of his second.

Lately there has been some attempt to regain its old stature. Unfortunately, that attempt has too often consisted of following behind blogs in opining about the previous days' events. Read it in firedoglake on Monday, TPM on Tuesday, and on the NYT ed page Wednesday, pretty much. Today they broke the mold a little by introducing a couple of important topics that haven't been heavy blog topics and have in fact been largely ignored by everybody, blogosphere and mass media alike. Neither of the issues is new and neither editorial has much of anything new to say about them, but both are important and the fact that the NYT is raising them at all might help bring them back into prominence, at least for a little while.

Voting rights activist, John Gideon has passed away. Brad Friedman, who was a firend and colleague of John, has a obituary here. I did not know John personally but I knew him through my volunteer work with the Coalition for Voting Integrity. He often appeared on our radio show, Voice of the Voters, to give updates from the world of election integrity. As Brad's obituary makes clear, John was a dedicated and stalwart worker for a transparent election process. His passion and his voice will be greatly missed by the movement he helped create.

Neither the Dem not the Pub in Georgia's Senate race got a plurality of the vote so, on December 2, there's going to be a run-off. The Pub, Slimy Saxby Chambliss, the guy who stole his seat from Max Cleland, a handicapped Viet Nam war hero, by Swiftboating him and then having Diebold voting machines switching Democratic votes to Republican votes. Even at that, the snake just slunk by. As a Senator, he's proved to be a great golfer. That's what he spent most of his time doing and also, according tothe Atlanta Journal-Constitution, what most of the money his party pumped into Senate campaigns was actually spent on. (Via TMiss)

From way back in August, Dean Baker told us how to help homeowners who are underwater: Own to Rent.Now he's updated the discussion of what it means to bailout homeowners.

I volunteer with a person who has been predicting that PA will be this year's Florida and Ohio. My tinfoil hat starts buzzing when I read stories like this, which appear to be softening the ground for such an outcome. Bonus points: Our Ms. Bumiller wrote it!

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones has suffered and aneurysm and is not expected to survive. That's tragic news of course for her friends and family but it's also very bad news for the country. In 2005, Tubbs Jones received the Backbone Award when she challenged the 2004 Ohio presidential elections results. She's a realiable Progressive vote and a fighter. It's a real setback to maybe lose her, when we need Progressive fighters so much.

Here she is on the Colbert Report discussing some of her accomplishments and giving her classic answer to his perennial question about the quality of President Bush.

UPDATE: Rep. Tubbs Jones has died. Condolences to her friends, family and constituents.

Whether either of them is on BO's short list is questionable but their presence on Obama's critical overseas mission (critical politically) is certainly suggestive.

Wait a minute... BO's considering a Republican as his Veep?

Well, yeah, maybe just for show to pump up his "beyond politics" message, but yeah. Why not? Hagel's against the Iraq war and isn't one of the drooling/looneytoons contingent of GOP whackjobs who think if girls travel in bunches to the rest rooms at school they must all be lesbians (see Coburn, Tom, GOP Sen from OK). Of course, he may have stolen the election he won to get his job, but don't they all do that?

Fulton County judge on Friday declined to halt enforcement of the state's controversial photo ID law when voters go to the polls to cast ballots in Tuesday's primaries.

The ruling, by Superior Court Judge Tom Campbell, means voters must present photo IDs when going to the polls on July 15. The Georgia Democratic Party had filed suit, seeking a temporary restraining order against the law.

The state Democratic Party had asked Campbell to grant a temporary restraining order halting enforcement of the 2006 law. It requires all Georgia voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls.

"After considering the evidence and balancing the harms alleged by each party, the court finds that the plaintiff has failed to meet the legal standard for the granting of a temporary restraining order," Campbell wrote.

Secretary of State Karen Handel told Campbell there would be "mass chaos" at the state's 3,000 precincts if the judge granted such an order.

"It would really put the entire process in disarray," she testified. She said it would be "impossible" to change the requirements at the precincts in just four days.

Thing is, see, Tom Campbell is a Republican hack appointed by Gov Sonny Perdue, a GOP hack of a slightly more exalted order. Both of them are long-time Bushies with the ethics of carrion - Purdue won his title as Governor when Karl Rove stole it for him - and in order for Tomboy to find legitimate "harm", something bad would have to happen to a Republican. It didn't. It happened to the poor and disadvantaged, and they can go screw themselves. These are modern conservatives we're talking about, and your right to vote doesn't mean anything to them if you're not probably going to vote Pub.

Constitution and places an undue burden on the right to vote, particularly on the poor, the disabled and minorities.

"It serves no purpose," Bondurant said of the law. "It does not prevent fraud. It affects the right to vote."

Bondurant is, of course, explaining precisely why two GOP hacks like Handel and Campbell wanted the law passed and wanted it to be kept in force. This is why the Bush Admin put so much energy into packing Federal and state benches with Pubs. They want their unConstitutional infringements on likely Democratic voters to continue unimpeded by any consideration of law or fairness. Win At Any Price, that's their credo.

Because it has to be. If they couldn't steal elections, they wouldn't win any.

In the February primaries, Bondurant noted, 409 provisional ballots were cast but only 155 voters returned with acceptable identification. That meant that 254 people who wanted to vote were not allowed to because of the law, Bondurant said.

Know what the state's lawyer said?

The voters might have just decided that, because Barrack Obama overwhelmingly won the Democratic primary and Mike Huckabee handily won the Republican primary, they may not have wanted to go to the trouble to cast votes in elections where the outcome was no longer in question. Also, Cohen suggested, some of those voters may not have been who they said they were in the first place.

(emphasis added)

Might as well accuse the victims whose rights you're stealing of being thieves. Have a little smoke with your mirrors. "Anyway, who cares why people like that don't vote? Please don't confuse me with, you know, compassion, intelligence, and fairness. They're not my long suit."

These people are pathetic excuses for human beings, and frankly, I'm beginning to believe they may be clinically insane. I can't think of any other way to explain their bizarre inability to connect with any homo sapien who makes less than $$1MIL$$ a minute.

I couldn't leave without noting that the Bush penchant for election-rigging got even more obvious this week. The NYT editorial board took him to task today, and the substance of what he's trying to pull won't be news to long-time readers.

The White House is removing a member of the Federal Election Commission for standing up for clean elections, while trying to install another member whose specialty is keeping eligible voters from casting ballots. The Senate, which must confirm nominees, should insist that President Bush appoint commissioners with a proven record of supporting voting rights and fair elections.

Yes, they should. But they won't. I'll leave you to guess why.

Bush is president only because, leave us never forget, he stole both presidential elections. The dirty tricks played by GOP operatives under Karl Rove (will Karl apologize for his evil on his deathbed, too, a la Lee Atwater, long after the damage has been done? who cares?) were wide-spread and mean-spirited, as befits the party and the man they were in aid of. Katherine Harris (who will be back to chicken-dancing for hire any day now) purged the Florida voter rolls of blacks, Ken Blackwell (a black man himself, so the rumor goes) played shuffleboard with black voting places and dumped carloads of black (Democratic, natch) ballots in landfills from Cleveland to Toledo, and Saxby Chambliss had electronic help turning Democratic votes into GOP ones. So this is, I suppose, relatively minor if typical:

Mr. Bush is purging the current F.E.C. chairman, David Mason, presumably because he was responsible enough to challenge the funding machinations of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. Mr. Mason shocked his fellow Republicans by notifying Mr. McCain that he might run afoul of the law by switching from public funding to private donations once he secured the party’s nomination.

The White House proposes to replace Mr. Mason with Donald McGahn, a Republican warhorse. F.E.C. commissioners are expected to be aligned with a party — one of the new Democratic nominees is a staff member of Senator Charles Schumer of New York — but Mr. McGahn has a particularly partisan background. He was the party’s Congressional campaign counsel — and the ethics lawyer for Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader from Texas who left office under multiple clouds.

(emphasis added)

I mean, in the Bush presidency the Federal Elections Commission has been a joke anyway. Of the six members, two have resigned and the other two Bush didn't bother to replace when their terms were up. There are only two members left, which makes the FEC, as the NYT puts it, "inoperable". If Mason is chugged under the collapsing Bush dam for the heinous crime of daring to charge a Republican with campaign financing shenanigans - which is, as we all know, the right of GOP candidates everywhere - and replaces him with this...hack...the FEC won't be a joke but a travesty of a disaster of a catastrophe of a joke.

Bush will have what he wants: an FEC that will turn a blind ideological eye to massive GOP vote fraud and attack the Democrats for non-existant voter fraud. If McCain can't win the election on his own hook - and it's perfectly obvious he can't - then maybe Bush's FEC can make sure Pub Ops can steal it for him.

I appreciate the efforts of people working to document obvious failures of DRE voting machines but I don't want anyone to lose sight of the fact that no matter how many machines obviously fail or don't obviously fail, what's wrong with these machines is that they are unable to be independently verified. It's not like we need to wonder about why that's a problem. Last year in Bucks County an election was decided by fewer votes than the number of votes involved in a discrepancy between votes cast and voters signed in. The case went to a judge who decided that

“Beyond
the conclusions asserted by petitioners, there was no evidentiary basis
to suggest that the machine had malfunctioned and there were adequate
and plausible reason given for the discrepancy between the poll book
numbers and the numbers recorded on the electronic machines,”

So the machine's results stood even though they were impossible to audit independently because there were no voter-marked paper ballots to count. The machine didn't obviously fail. It didn't burst into flame. It didn't come to life and kill anyone. It just sat there, unauditable and trusted to pick the winner. Welcome to November 2008 because 90% of PA voters vote on machines just like that. There's a lot of talk in the election integrity world about Pennsylvania being the next Florida. I'm with them. But even if there isn't any uproar because the machines worked fine, remember that absent proper recounts of voter-marked paper ballots, you won't know who won. And also remember that it will be the fault of everyone who has ignored this problem since 2000, which is just about everyone.

Bang for the Buck: Boosting the American Economy

Compassionate Conservatism in Action

Molly

"We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war."

Zinn

"[O]ur time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice."

Bono

"True religion will not let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom. Love thy neighbor is not a piece of advice, it's a command. ...

God, my friends, is with the poor and God is with us, if we are with them. This is not a burden, this is an adventure."

The Reverend Al Sharpton

Ray wasn't singing about what he knew, 'cause Ray had been blind since he was a child. He hadn't seen many purple mountains. He hadn't seen many fruited plains. He was singing about what he believed to be.

Mr. President, we love America, not because of all of us have seen the beauty all the time.

But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.

Marx

''With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent will produce eagerness, 50 percent positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime which it will not scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.''